Software Engineer - LiveGraph

Livegraph is a core Figma technology driving our realtime web and mobile experiences. Similar to GraphQL, it sends data from relational databases, caches, and backend services to clients on any device. But innovating on GraphQL, it updates the user experiences it powers automatically – making every Figma experience feel alive and multi-player.

We are looking for engineers who are excited about scaling stateful distributed systems, and who have an eye for building expressive APIs for querying dynamic source-of-truth data. A successful engineer will help define how realtime product experiences are built across Figma’s product suite.

This is a full time role that can be held from one of our US hubs or remotely in the United States.

Learn more about Livegraph:

• https://www.figma.com/blog/livegraph-real-time-data-fetching-at-figma/

• https://atscaleconference.com/videos/livegraph-scaling-real-time-data-access/

• https://www.figma.com/blog/under-the-hood-of-figmas-infrastructure/

What you’ll do at Figma:

• Design, build and operate Livegraph, a realtime query system, as well as Livegraph subsystems.

• Drive down tech debt and improve engineering standards, tooling, and processes.

• Collaborate with infrastructure and product teams to define simple interfaces that improve reliability, efficiency, and developer velocity.

• Help debug and fix production issues across services and multiple levels of the stack.

We'd love to hear from you if you have:

• 10+ years of experience as a software engineer.

• Experience as a team lead, coordinating a group of engineers to build and scale complex distributed systems in a high growth environment.

• Experience safely evolving infrastructure that actively serves production traffic to heterogeneous clients.

• Experience running an online service hosting at least 100,000 concurrent users.

• Mentorship experiences with both junior and senior engineers.

• Excellent technical communication skills, working across multiple teams and functions to deliver solutions.

While not required, it’s an added plus if you also have:

• A history of solving difficult engineering problems with novel, custom solutions.

• Hands-on experience building developer-facing query systems.

• Experience evangelizing innovative, internal infrastructure, and developer tools.

• Experience and lessons learned from transforming a company’s distributed systems from monolithic software development to a federated approach.

• A love for new programming languages and syntaxes.

A little about our tech stack:

• Livegraph: Go (and legacy Typescript)

• Around Figma’s server-side: Typescript, React, Ruby, Rust

• Built on: AWS, EKS

At Figma, one of our values is Grow as you go. We believe in hiring smart, curious people who are excited to learn and develop their skills. If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with the points outlined in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.